This week’s medium box per the email:

• Collards
• Garden Gem Tomatoes
• Green Butterhead Lettuce
• Green Zucchini
• Italian Eggplant
• Mixed Carmen Italian Peppers
• Spaghetti Squash 

Top right is Garden Gem Tomatoes and bottom right is surprise extra tomatoes, probably Roma. The Garden Gem Tomato is fantastic. Here’s a fascinating long read from 2015 about its development:

To create it, Klee took the best-tasting tomato he’d ever grown—the Maglia Rosa, a grape tomato that tastes extraordinary but, like so many heirlooms, is very hard to grow—and crossed it with a commercial powerhouse called Fla. 8059, which grows superbly but tastes like tap water.

He was aiming for a compromise—a tomato that grew well and tasted good. What he got shocked him. Like its commercial parent, Klee’s new tomato boasted excellent shelf life, disease resistance, and productivity. But by some miracle, it tasted so good that its flavor scores were statistically identical to its heirloom parent. Klee dubbed his miracle fruit the Garden Gem. 

“This Is the Perfect Tomato But supermarkets refuse to sell it” by Mark Schatzker, Slate

The Roma tomato is a good cooking tomato. Maybe sauce, maybe chopped up and stuffed in the Italian peppers like Week 14’s banana pepper boats.

I really enjoyed the baba ganoush I made last week and may make it again with these 2 massive eggplants. I poked holes in the skin (a must because they may explode if air can’t release) and grilled them to the point of looking like deflated alien offal, then peeled and mashed them with olive oil and garlic. I ended up eating it as a dip with slices of raw green bell pepper and also with naan chips but also used it as pasta sauce with spaghetti and leftover grilled yellow squash on a lazy day. It worked really well as a pasta sauce.

Here is a list of 11 zucchini recipes. 4 of the recipes use the zucchini for zoodles though (zucchini cut into long noodle form, usually with a spiralizer tool or mandolin unless you’re absurdly patient).

Speaking of noodles that are actually vegetables, a spaghetti squash!

Some people, like a former roommate, are wowed that its form is a dupe for carb noodles and top it like actual spaghetti with tomato sauce. I actually hate using it like that. It makes me sad for the vegetable and my tastebuds confused.

Most recipes have you cut in the squash in half longwise and roast the halves. This produces wetter, shorter “noodles.” Instead, cut on the short side into rings. It roasts better (more surface area) and the noodles are longer. https://passtheplants.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash/

But if you cut rings, you can’t serve it in its own shell: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/spaghetti-squash-boats/

I usually roast it the same way, but then use it in recipes that typically call for other squashes, like in a butternut squash chili. Or I just add real carbs (noodles, rice, quinoa, etc.).